How Construction Owners Can Stay Ahead of Risk

I recently read the November/December 2025 issue of Constructor Magazine (published by Associated General Contractors). It is a useful read for anyone managing capital programs right now, and not just because of the construction coverage.

Tariffs are disrupting procurement. Workforce shortages are delaying nearly half of all projects. Data center construction is accelerating at a pace that strains every trade in the country. And contractors are formalizing processes they used to handle informally because the cost of getting it wrong has gone up.

For owners of capital programs, none of this is abstract. These pressures land on your schedule, your capital budget, and your board reporting. The question is not whether the risk exists. It is whether your program governance is structured to manage it before it becomes a problem.

The Numbers Are Clear

According to the AGC/NCCER Workforce Survey cited throughout the issue, 92 percent of construction firms are struggling to fill open positions. Forty-five percent report project delays tied to labor shortages. Sixteen percent have experienced delays or cancellations due to tariff-driven cost increases.

When an EPC contractor cannot staff up, when transformer lead times extend past twelve months, when steel and aluminum costs jump because of tariff cascades, the impact is immediate. The contractor's constraints become your constraints as the program owner.

Strong owner-side program management does not eliminate these risks. But it makes them visible early enough to act.

What the Data Center Surge Means for Energy Infrastructure

One of the more consequential themes in the issue is the surge in data center construction. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, and OpenAI have committed extraordinary capital to this buildout. Permitting has been streamlined by executive order. The scale of demand for power is increasing faster than utilities planned for.

Data centers currently consume about 4.4 percent of U.S. electricity, a figure the Department of Energy projects will reach somewhere between 6.7 and 12 percent by 2028. Trimble's director of industry workflow put it this way in the issue:

"I don't think the word 'surging' even begins to describe it. There are dozens and dozens of projects going on right now, and mega-data centers are on the rise."  -- Duane Gleason, Director of Industry Workflow, Trimble

For utilities and infrastructure owners, that demand translates into simultaneous capital programs: new transmission corridors, substation expansions, generation interconnections, and distribution reinforcements. These are not isolated projects. They are portfolios under schedule pressure, and most owner organizations were not designed to manage that level of concurrency with the tools and structures they currently have.

Contractors Are Tightening Their Controls. Are Owners?

One of the more instructive parts of the issue describes how leading general contractors are now running formal reviews of subcontractor financial health and workload capacity before making awards. Maria DiTommaso, Senior Risk and Contract Manager at Bond Brothers, explained the firm's approach:

"We require subcontractors to submit a work-in-progress schedule so we can see what they're doing currently and what they have ahead. We want to make sure that if we award the business, we're not going to overload them."  -- Maria DiTommaso, Senior Risk and Contract Manager, Bond Brothers

Owners should ask themselves a similar question about how they are evaluating contractor capacity across their own portfolios.

In our experience working with utilities, cooperatives, and public agencies, vendor performance management at the owner level is often informal. Feedback is relationship-driven. Performance information is not systematically captured in the project management information system. Lessons learned do not reliably inform future procurement decisions.

That gap becomes expensive in a market like this one. When vendor risk is not quantified, early warning signals are missed. What could have been a schedule adjustment becomes a default event.

The Governance Problem

Program management is the discipline of organizing projects so they collectively advance an organization's strategy. It requires more than tracking cost and schedule. It requires alignment across procurement, engineering, finance, operations, and risk management.

Without structured governance, risk management is reactive. Spreadsheets sit outside the PMIS. Portfolio reviews happen quarterly. Escalations are informal. In a stable environment, that may be manageable. In a constrained labor market with tariff volatility and competition for materials and trades from hyperscale construction programs, it is not.

The issue also references an estimate of nearly one trillion dollars in annual productivity loss across the construction industry. That figure reflects the cumulative cost of fragmented data, informal processes, and governance gaps. Some of it is contractor-side inefficiency. But much of it originates on the owner side, where program structures are insufficient for the scale and complexity of current capital programs.

What THAMPICO Does

THAMPICO is a program and project management consultancy focused on energy infrastructure, utilities, and capital programs. We work on the owner side. Our role is to strengthen execution capacity so capital programs perform predictably under pressure. Our consultants have supported over one billion dollars in capital programs across utilities, cooperatives, and public agencies.

Our work typically includes four areas:

• PMO design and deployment. Clarifying governance structure, escalation pathways, reporting standards, and portfolio visibility. We help organizations turn a PMO from a reporting function into an execution function.

• PMIS implementation and optimization. Centralizing RFIs, submittals, cost data, change orders, vendor performance metrics, and risk registers into one operational system. Most organizations find that Procore, e-Builder, or Projectmates, properly configured for their workflows, eliminates the data silos that make proactive governance difficult.

• Risk framework development. Establishing quantitative risk registers tied to schedule and financial exposure. Moving from static logs reviewed periodically to active risk management that supports board and regulatory reporting.

• Vendor performance integration. Embedding measurable performance criteria directly into project workflows so future procurement decisions are informed by actual data, not just institutional memory.

Strong Owner Governance Benefits Contractors Too

Strong owner-side governance is not adversarial to contractors. It makes projects more efficient for everyone involved. Clear scope definition reduces change order disputes. Timely decisions prevent schedule drift. Structured reporting improves transparency on both sides. When the owner can read and respond to project data correctly, things move better.

We have also found that owners with mature PMOs tend to be better clients for their contractors. Subcontractor default events, cost overruns, and disputed change orders are more common on programs where owner governance is weak. Better owner governance reduces those friction points for everyone.

If you are a contractor or construction manager who works regularly with utility or infrastructure owners, and you are experiencing these pain points from the other side, we are also interested in that conversation. Referral relationships with contractors, insurers, and advisory firms who serve overlapping clients are something we actively pursue.

Three Forces Owners Cannot Afford to Ignore in 2026

Tariff volatility and supply chain fragility are not temporary. They are restructuring how procurement works for capital programs. Labor scarcity is persistent and will not resolve on a timeline that helps current programs. And the competitors for your contractors' attention, the hyperscale data center programs, are not going away.

Owners that invest in program governance infrastructure now will be positioned to manage these conditions. Those that continue with informal structures will find the margin for error has disappeared.

The construction industry will always carry risk. The differentiator is not who faces it. It is who builds the organizational capability to manage it consistently.

If you are leading a utility, cooperative, or public agency capital program and the conditions described in this article sound familiar, we would welcome a conversation about where your governance structure stands and what options exist to strengthen it. By Sirous Thampi, Founding Partner, THAMPICO LLC

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